1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to manufacturing sliders in hard disk drives, or more specifically, to tracking individual sliders stored in a slider tray.
2. Description of the Related Art
When manufacturing hard disk drives, a plurality of sliders are typically manufactured on a common substrate—e.g., a semiconductor wafer. Each slider includes, among other things, a transducer for writing data to a magnetic disk and a sensor for reading data from the magnetic disk. After creating the sliders, the common substrate may be diced into rows that include a subset of the sliders. Further manufacture techniques may be performed such as, for example, lapping the subset of sliders to form an air bearing surface (ABS).
Eventually, the sliders are separated and placed into a slider tray for further testing. Once the testing is complete, the sliders may be removed from the tray, attached to suspension arms, and integrated into a hard disk drive. Because knowing the precise number of sliders in the slider tray may indicate the total number of hard disk drives that can be manufactured, it is desirable to know the number of sliders in each tray by maintain a mapping of the sliders in a slider tray. Accurately tracking the location of the sliders in the tray using the trap map may affect downstream fabrication steps. For example, slider dynamic electrical testers may use the tray map to identify where to pick up and place the sliders. If a slider is physically present on the tray but does not exist in the tray maps, the slider will not be picked up and tested. Conversely, if a slider is missing on the tray but has an entry in the tray map, the testers will waste time attempting to pick up a non-existing slider at the position identified by the map. However, manually counting the sliders stored in each tray to confirm the information in the tray map may lead to an unreliable result and be an inaccurate indicator of unit production capability.